ALLURE: We’re living longer lives than ever before, so watching John and Annie gives me hope that my sex life will be long, too. I wanted to show that sex can be absolutely beautiful and wonderful and sexy even with older bodies. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people. Ernaux’s acute awareness of the formative influence of class underpins her entire body of work and in the wake of her win, many in France praised her work for its ongoing focus on the French working-class experience. In describing what was at stake for Diwan filming that scene, Ernaux told me, “it was important to dare to confront the viewer with an unbearable image… I did it in my book, but I knew it would be a more difficult proposition to do it in the film.

‘We are made of words’: the radically intimate writing of

In her body, in the way she walks, in her gaze, her gestures, she brings into existence, in the strongest sense of the word, the ordinariness of this tragedy: going to class, or to a student party, and having to find a solution, and then money, because time is inexorably moving forward within her body.Before you could ask questions on the internet, everything that happened inside the body was a mystery,” says Audrey Diwan, the director of the film Happening, in which this scene appears early on. Happening, which won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice film festival last year, is adapted from the searing 2000 autobiography L’Événement by Annie Ernaux, one of France’s most acclaimed authors. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.

Anny Aurora in Pure Taboo Anny Aurora in Pure Taboo

This is one of the problems that we need to talk about, because in all other aspects of life, we don't let that happen.

That’s the female gaze, and this is precisely what Diwan has managed to do, in terms of her formal choices as a director. Art brings to light – makes exist – reality unhinged from its contingencies, its dispersal into particular existences. Diwan was one of the first signatories when the group was launched, and when she made Happening, she assembled a team of mainly female crew members around her.

Annie Ernaux ‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux

Westfield (Derrick Pierce), who's attraction for Anne clouds his judgement, making a scheme to retake Anne, concocted by the lecherous owner of the transition home Mr. If we make it to 100, we'll still be making love," Annie tells me via Skype from the Canary Islands home she shares with John.In the book, Ernaux reflects that although she is writing from a time when abortion has become legal, this doesn’t lessen the importance of talking about reproductive rights. The probe, the hairbrush, the Formica table: these objects combine to create a social history, and in doing so give voice to the silences of many women of that generation.